The Thing Is
by amythis
Summary: A month after Angela left Iowa to go back to Connecticut, Tony tries to explain to himself what their relationship was, is, and might be.


The thing is it's too simple to say Angela made me a better man. She did, but there's a lot more to it than that.

I've been with a lot of women but I've only been myself with her. My full self anyway. I've always had a lot of friends and girlfriends. It's very easy to be someone people like on a surface level. I'm not bragging. It's just how it is. I'm seen as a good athlete, a ladies' man, a charming, funny guy, etc. But that's it. OK, maybe also a good dancer, good poker player, whatever. But surface stuff.

With Angela, I thought at first she would just see me as her housekeeper, and that was fine. But soon I wanted more. Not like the neighbors think, where I was hired for "my other services," as Joanne Parker once put it. I wanted to be Angela's friend. I wanted to be myself around her. Maybe not my full self, but maybe almost as much as I was around Marie.

That may sound bad that I was never my full self around my late wife. Don't get me wrong. I opened up to Marie about a lot of things, like how it felt when my mom died. And I shared some of my hopes and dreams. She encouraged me just as much as my dad did about becoming a pro ball player, when most people in the neighborhood thought of me as the punk who used to get into trouble. I never told her about wanting to go to college, but that didn't seem like an attainable dream. She thought I was smart but she figured like I did that I was too Brooklyn to go to college, even Brooklyn College. And I didn't have the money until I was starting to get paid to play baseball, and by then I had my career, and a wife and child.

I didn't know or want to know that she had dreams of her own, dreams about being an artist. She was a wife and mother and that should've been enough. It was enough for all the other women in the neighborhood.

Then I lost her and then my career. I had a little girl to raise. Even attainable dreams had to be put away. Or I'd tell myself maybe Sam could go to college, be a doctor or something else big. But for now, I just had to keep going.

I lived very much on the surface. I dated women who just wanted a good time, sex and laughs. Maybe dancing. Definitely bowling.

And then I got this opportunity to be a housekeeper in Connecticut. I know, it doesn't sound like much. The thing is, it was in a great neighborhood and I hoped Sam could have a brighter future. I could save up, maybe she'd get a scholarship, go to college. I wasn't thinking about my own ambitions, other than to be the best darn housekeeper in the neighborhood, which I soon was.

If Angela had been like all the other women, not just rich but stuck-up about it, I don't think anything would've happened. OK, if I'd worked for Mrs. Wilmington after her divorce, then, yeah, I probably would've fooled around. But I mean I don't think anything would've happened emotionally. No connection, no growth.

I'd never met anyone like Angela before. I still haven't. I've met other successful women, but they didn't have her vulnerable "little-girl" side. And I probably wouldn't have seen that side if I hadn't lived with her and become her best friend. It's not like she shows it to everyone.

She was, is, complicated. Part of her is this advertising genius, so driven and uptight. And another part is still the insecure fat girl in glasses with the gorgeous mother who added to her insecurities. And there's also this woman with an incredibly dry wit. And she's also sexy, sometimes as if she doesn't even know it, and other times like she knows exactly how to get to me, in a way that Tanya and all the others never could.

All of that would make me love Angela. But I also love her for the way she loves me. And even before we became involved (and that's a hard thing to explain because it feels like we were never entirely uninvolved), she believed in me. She saw things in me I didn't know were there. In the same way she can size up a situation in one devastatingly witty line, or come up with the perfect slogan for an unsellable product, she can look right into my soul and tell me who I am.

And that scares the hell out of me. I love it, I need it, but sometimes I wish she just saw the surface, like everybody else, even Sam and Mona sometimes.

I don't mean Angela will say, "You know, Tony, what you should do is..." No, that's Kathleen. With Angela it's more like me saying, "I know it sounds crazy, but I want to..." And Angela will say, "I don't think that's crazy." And then it becomes not crazy. Run for PTA President. Go to college. Become a teacher. Become a professor. If I said I wanted to be President of the US, she'd start working on the slogan for that.

So sex. I know that that's what everyone thinks it's about. They've always thought that. The thing is, it is and it isn't. Angela and I agreed early on that if we ever got together, it would be incredible. And we meant physically. Well, I've had that with other women. I may have it again someday, although right now I don't even feel like going to dinner and a movie.

The thing is, the thing is, the thing is we knew it would be our whole selves. It would be a physical, emotional, mental, maybe even spiritual connection. And that scared the hell out of me. I think it scared her, too, but less, because, even with my strong needs and drives, I was always the one to pull away before it got past necking, sometimes even before kissing.

I did other stuff to our relationship, stuff I'm not proud of. Yeah, flirting and sometimes more with other women. I know that not just upset but confused her, especially when it was at times when we were getting really close to getting really close.

Some of it was that I was afraid of losing her. I didn't have as much of a connection with Marie, partly because Marie and I were so young and partly because I'd closed myself off from her in some ways. It still hurt, like losing-a-limb level hurt, when I lost Marie. Why open myself up to that again?

And also, maybe I don't like someone knowing me as well as Angela did, does. So I'd act out, like the poker game with the guys and her teenage son, even though I knew, probably because I knew, it would tick her off. I'd laugh when Mona insulted her, even join in sometimes.

I'd tell myself I was being independent. Angela didn't own me, even though I was her housekeeper. Even though I was her boyfriend and then fiance. But I was less myself when I acted the ways I used to, well, worse than I used to. And it was like there was this other, better Tony watching from the inside, wondering how I could hurt her like this. But I couldn't seem to stop.

About Kathleen. The thing is, yeah, she was pretty and sexy, but what drew me to her originally was she was a waitress with dreams. I thought that would be a better match. But Kathleen didn't care about much more than the surface. I'd gotten used to coming home and telling Angela about what I'd learned in school that day. Not like Jonathan when he was eight and precocious and obsessed with reptiles. I wasn't reporting to Mommy. I was talking about ideas with someone who was smarter than any of my professors, and yet she treated me like her intellectual equal. I didn't get that she had even when I wasn't going to school, even when I was still very much the Brooklyn ex-jock.

Kathleen and I would get together to "study," and that went about as well as it had with Tanya in high school. It was fun, of course, but that wasn't what I was looking for. I wasn't seventeen anymore. And I couldn't talk with Angela about my classes anymore because there was this barrier between us, a barrier I had put up.

And then when I was a professor, well, Angela would listen politely while I talked. She'd ask questions, she was attentive. But she wasn't arguing, challenging me, like she used to. And the driven advertising genius? She was knitting afghans and painting watercolors and going bowling. She was preparing herself to be the wife she thought I wanted.

I told myself she was happy. She said she was happy. She looked happy. And it was wonderful that she wasn't stressed.

Yeah, we had sex. OK, we weren't married but I figured we would be soon. And we were living together, alone, no kids, no Mona, no nosy friends and neighbors and Ernie the water-guy.

And the sex was good. Sometimes great. There was definitely an emotional and sometimes mental connection. But not spiritual. I didn't feel like we connected on every level. How could we when she had closed part of herself off? I'd tell myself we'd waited too long, we'd grown too comfortable together. And maybe there was some of that, but I think I knew.

So now she's gone. And the thing is, she's not gone. Yeah, she's in Connecticut and I'm in Iowa, but her presence is still here, and not just the afghans and paintings I can't yet bring myself to take to Goodwill. She changed me and I'm not the Tony from eight years ago. In a way, I live on the surface. On campus, I'm Professor Micelli, and I'm coach to the teams. But I've still got this dream of having everything I had with Angela and everything I could've had with her.

Sam still lives in her guest house. With the guy Sam married too young. I've had to accept that Sam won't be a doctor or anything big. She's still done more with her life than if we'd never left Brooklyn, and she's still only 20. Look at me, I didn't do anything big till I was 40. (No offense to the Cards of course.) Maybe someday Sam will meet someone who will bring out the best in her, like Angela did for me. Or maybe Hank will grow up to be that person. Who knows? Maybe Marie would've grown up to be that person for me, if she'd lived past 25.

Anyway, Sam says Angela is doing OK. Not seeing anyone but doing well with the agency. The agency I urged Angela to start. I guess I brought out some good things in Angela. Some of them were things that scared me a little, like her wild, spontaneous side, especially in Jamaica.

Maybe I was afraid of what it'd be like if she was fully herself. If I was fully myself. And yet, I think that's what I wanted all along, when I thought about us going to bed, dating, getting married, not necessarily in that order. (And we did do all that, in that order, now that I think about it, although it was usually without intending to do any of it. That motel. Jonathan's blind date set-up. South Carolina.)

The thing is, there's a part of me that thinks when I'm done with my teaching contract, I'll go back to her and offer my full self in exchange for her full self. And maybe she'll think that's a good offer.


End file.
